D.Ed. / Educator teams in secondary schools of the Kathorus area, lack the formal decisionmaking authority to implement the Integrated Quality Management System (IQMS) successfully. These teams lack the formalised horizontal structure that could empower them to decentralise decision-making authority among educator teams at all levels of the school and provide a lateral communication system in which members of teams communicate directly with one another in an organisation. The educator teams have not received effective training on the implementation of the IQMS from the Department of Education (DoE) and the DoE has not provided these teams with regular training programmes in their schools on implementing the IQMS successfully. Consequently, educator teams have been frustrated and have shown feelings of hopelessness, despair, and apathy, and a lack of commitment to their profession. The general aim of the study was to determine how educator teams can be empowered to implement the IQMS in secondary schools successfully. In order to investigate the empowerment of educator teams for implementing the IQMS successfully in these schools, the specific objectives were to: • explore the meaning of empowerment and determine the implications of empowerment for implementing the IQMS. • determine the perceptions of educators and school management teams (SMTs) on empowering educator teams to successfully implement the IQMS in secondary schools. The study introduced the problem of this inquiry and presented the background of the research problem, which was associated with the failure to successfully implement the IQMS in schools and the lack of authority of educator teams to implement the IQMS effectively. The problem statement, research questions and specific sub-research questions, the aims and objectives of the study and the research methodology, ethical considerations and the significance of the study were discussed.